LONDON (AP) — An Englishman — possibly famed double agent Kim Philby — was recruited by the Soviet Union in 1937 to assassinate Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco Franco, according to a secret British document released today.

A plot to kill Franco involving "a young Englishman, a journalist of good family, an idealist and a fanatical anti-Nazi" was hatched by the notoriously brutal head of Soviet secret police, Nikolai Yezhov, according to a British intelligence memo written by a Soviet defector.

The newly declassified document said the English assassin was ordered on his deadly mission, but the plan stalled and unravelled after the assassin's contact in Spain was recalled to Moscow.

A British intelligence officer scrawled "prob Philby" in the margin of the document. Philby was a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War for the Times of London.

Philby later became one of history's most successful double agents. He passed British and American secrets to Moscow in the 1940s and 50s while working at the top level of British intelligence.

He disappeared in 1963 while working as a journalist in Beirut, and surfaced in the Soviet Union later that year.

The KGB gave Philby a full ceremonial funeral after his death in 1988 at age 76. Despite political changes in post-Soviet Russia, the country's secret services still regard him as a hero.

The declassified file was one of more than 200 documents released today by Britain's Public Records Office.